


Immortalizing Hope

by Guardian_Rex



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/M, Multi, OCs - Freeform, Other, gaining immortality, my mental ramblings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-08
Updated: 2017-11-10
Packaged: 2019-01-30 23:40:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12663822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guardian_Rex/pseuds/Guardian_Rex
Summary: "You likely think that the day I discovered my immortality was something grand.  It wasn't.  I was walking the dog, and some asshole shot me."  The story of how a guy became immortal through stubbornness and hope.





	1. Chapter 1

_CRACK_

Rex stared, horrified and in pain.  The sound of gunfire rang in his ears and blood spilled from his chest, staining his clothes.  He fell, the man in front of him looking stupidly satisfied and the dog Rex had been walking lunging at the man.  Rex hit the cold concrete and his own screaming barely registered through the haze of pain, the explosive shot echoing in his mind over and over and over.  He always imagined that everything would just fade to black when he died, but Rex had never considered that he might be murdered.  The reality of it all was sharpened by the pain that crashed into him again like a wave from all over that never ebbed.  He remembered making Ronan laugh, kissing Sophie, hugging Austin, crying over exams, playing games like his life depended on winning as efficiently as possible.  Sophie was barely hanging on by a thread, Ronan danging over the edge of a canyon with no visible bottom.  He was that thread, that pillar, the Strong One who refused to let them die just because the world is cruel.  Without him to push them forward... their promises to live would be null, void, pointless.  Sophie would die.  Ronan would die.  His loved ones, his precious writer and cherished artist, they'd die unfulfilled and feeling alone and unloved in an uncaring world.  Rex refused to do that to them, he had promised not to die!  Rex had promised them, made a pact with them and so many other friends of his, that he would not die so long as they didn't.  Rex did not break his promises to his friends, especially not to his lovers.

Anger mixed in with the pain, settled in his bones, filled his lungs and raced through his veins.  How dare this closed minded man bearing a symbol of hatred try to take him away from Ronan and from Sophie?  How  _dare_ he try to break Rex's promise to his precious ones?  Rex's thoughts, always flitting about as fast as lightning, strayed to his games once more.  The power and skill he had cultivated within each of his avatars, the stories, and experiences he had woven for the characters he had crafted with pencil and paper.  Oh, the things he could do to improve the lives of his loved ones with that power, the vengeance he could reap upon those who slighted them and him, the  _good_ he could do with that kind of power.

Another wave of pain hit him and Rex looked up at the sound of a whining bark, saw the nazi had smacked away Angel and turned his gun on her.  The rage in his bones burned into fury, lividity, something beyond even that which he had no name for, such that he was made delirious by the emotion.  He lunged forward and tackled the man away from Angel, smacked the gun out of the nazi's hand and brought his fists down on the man's face.  Over and over again he struck, ignoring the Nazi's attempts to fight him off, his screams of hatred and death and fear.  Rex kept going until his fists were bloody and the man stopped moving but it wasn't  _enough_.  This monster had tried to  _kill him_ , tried to  _steal_ his loved ones'  _hope!_   Rex raised his hand to the sky and opened his mouth to cry out his wrath, and the sky roared with thunder in the stead of his vocal cords.  He brought his fist down once more.

 _ **BOOM**_!  The ground was upturned and melted, steam rising from the corpse underneath him. Rex slowly stood, staring at his hands covered in smoke, body perfectly fine though his clothes weren't. He was fine. He had been shot dead in the heart but he was alive and the Nazi that had shot him was a crispy critter at his feet. There was also whimpering behind him, and the smell of urine melding with that of burnt flesh. "Angel…" He stood, breath ragged and heart pounding furiously even though it had a hole in it a moment ago. Rex walked out of the crater of smoldering asphalt to see Angel, his mother's hound-pit mutt, had made a mess behind herself. "I guess I can let that slide since a lightning bolt just smoked a guy in front of you."  
  
Crouching down, Rex held out his hand and clicked his tongue. "C'mere Angel." He expected stubbornness, a refusal to move, a blank stare or even for her to run. Angel just walked over with her head bowed and eyes on his hand. Rex patted her head and kissed it, wrapping the dog in a hug. "You were a good girl, Angel. You get three pig ears tonight!" Shaking hands carded through sand-colored fur and Rex shuddered. He grabbed onto her leash and walked Angel back home.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Hysteria

Once he got home, Rex handed Angel one of the pig ears his mother had bought her, then put two more in her food bowl and walked to his room.  He stripped off the burnt, still smoking, bloodstained, and generally ruined clothes.  When he pulled off his glasses, Rex braced for pain and blinked when none came.  His glasses were perfectly undamaged, no warping of the wire, no melting on the plastic or glass.  There was a thin zigzag marking all over the frames but other than that, nothing had changed about them.  Setting them down, Rex grabbed his phone - also strangely undamaged - and walked into the bathroom.  He blared his usual playlist, turned on the water, and stepped in.  Tears welled up in his eyes, blurring his vision, and Rex slid down the wall of the shower, curling up into a ball at the bottom.  His breaths, which had been relatively even and sedated on the walk home, rattled his lungs and shook him to his bones.  The first strangled cry made it past his lips and Rex sat there sobbing, shaking and trying to get any sound other than the gunshot stuck in his head.

Twenty minutes later, Rex stepped out of the shower and dried off, staring down at his hands and narrowing his eyes at what he saw.  There were zigzag lines all over his arms, his stomach, his whole body.  When he looked in the mirror, they even decorated his face like a mosaic of lightning.  On his chest, over his heart, he felt and saw where the bullet had gone in, had gone completely through him, and left its mark.  It was completely sealed up, covered in freshly scarred skin and traced over with the lightning as well.  "How... how am I alive?"  His voice was scratchy and his throat hurt from his crying earlier, but he didn't care.  "How did I get out of being shot and struck by lightning with just some scars and Lichtenberg flowers?"  He thought back to his stories, where he played god and wrote himself in as a mischievous immortal, meddling in the lives of everyday men and heroic women.  "People don't just just get up from being shot in the heart!"  He was yelling now, pacing and waving his hands around wildly.  "Goliath isn't a real aspect of who I am, he's fictional, a persona, an avatar of my desired freedom!  I'm not really a god, that's all in fiction, there are no gods."  He walked outside of the bathroom, turning off the lights and yelped when a fly flew straight into his face.  Faster than usual, he smacked the fly out of his face and into a wall.  "Son of a swine fucking bastard, why can't all of you stupid bugs fuck off out of my house and D͢͡͞I̶E̵̡?"

Rex stomped his foot down and heat rushed from his chest down, pop rock candy explosions going off in his teeth and his veins and matching the heat.  White sparks flew out from where his foot touched the ground, spreading in a wave of electricity that struck the fly and washed over everything in the house.  "Fuck!"  Rex ran over to check on Angel, sighing in relief when he found her startled but unharmed.  He patted her over just to make sure and laughed when she nudged her face into his.  "Angel, stop, your nose is wet and it tickles."  Looking around, Rex spotted dead flies and ladybugs on the counters and floor.  When he checked the living room there was a crispy spider near the front door and he let out a slow breath.  "What the hell is going on?"  Before he could panic and squeeze the dog to death, Rex ran to his room and shut the door, clambering onto his bed and assuming the lotus position.

_In for three seconds, hold for three, out for four._   It took some doing, he wasn't used to focusing on something so simple like this, but Rex needed to do  _something_ to calm himself down.  His chorus breathing exercises were as good as any for calming down, and it worked.   After some amount of time that he didn't want to know, Rex felt his hands stop shaking and the tingling sensation - fireworks going off under his skin, rivers flowing through his veins, his bones the ground underneath him - and opened his eyes.  "When did I close them?"  Another deep breath and Rex got up, grabbing the phone off of his desk.  "Gotta tell Sophie, gotta tell Ronan, can't stay quiet anymore."  Rex turned his music back on and opened up the chat app he used to speak with his lovers and friends.

He opened up the chatroom between just the three of them and the first thing he typed out was  **I love you** ,  **both of you, so much**.  Sophie was the first to reply, Ronan likely still dozing since he was in a different timezone.  He explained the situation and what happened before looking at Sophie's  **I love you too.**   She was skeptical, of course, when she finished reading his story, asking him if it was a bad joke.  He went to the mirror, snapped a picture and assured her that no, this was not a joke.  He remembered the pain and the terror too well for it to have been a joke or a dream.  The proof was on his skin, on his ruined clothes, in the strange feelings all over his body.  Sophie's panicked replies were enough to assure Rex that he wasn't hallucinating, wasn't dreaming, and that all of this was real.  It gave him a sense of lucidity that he wasn't used to, and Rex was aware of pretty much everything around him.  The air flowing over his skin, the sound of the dog chewing her prize, the straining of the deck as it supported itself on legs near chewed to pieces by the dog.

An alert brought him back to his conversation and Rex huffed out a sigh.  Now both of them were worried about him, and Rex had to spend the next half hour assuring them that he was physically fine, just scarred and shaken.   **Already cried out a bunch of the stress**.  That relaxed them a bit, but he could indulge in a bit of roleplaying.  Olympus knew he needed a distraction.

After telling Sophie and Ronan that he was tired, Rex made sure that Angel wasn't destroying anything before he took his nap.  He ruffled her head and smiled.  "If only we could fix what you break, dumb dumb, maybe then I'd be less worried about you chewing our table to shreds."  Angel nuzzled his face in response and Rex huffed out a laugh.  "Maybe since I'm magick now, apparently, I can fix up the house like I killed all those flies."  A kiss to Angel's head and Rex walked back to his room, settling into the covers.  He set a timer, turned on his relaxing music, and closed his eyes to the sound of delta waves and raindrops hitting his window.


	3. Testing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Experimentation leads to discovery

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I write theses down in my notebook while work is slow, and type up what's in my head on the ride from work to home in my notes, and then refine it all into a chapter. And gods is it fun

Rex woke up groggy and sluggish as ever, though for once no perverse thoughts flitted into his head.  Shoving aside the oddity for later, Rex got to his feet and stretched.  Something was amiss, though he couldn't place it.  Rex grabbed his phone and his jaw dropped.  "Fuck."  The alarm for his nap continued on silently - damn the phone developers and their useless updates - and the clock read 9:12 AM.  He had slept through the entire night.  "I  _ never _ sleep that late, it was fucking 10 when I laid down for a nap!"  Rex turned off the useless timer and scrolled through the alerts from last night.  Very few of them were heart-wrenching, thankfully, but there were alarming questions about his safety and health.  Rex let out a sigh and leaned back on the bed.  "Oh sweet sensible Hades, I can't do this without food.  Thank Hades I'm off work today."

After he checked to make sure that he was, indeed, alone today, Rex forewent clothes and made some eggs.  Also grits, and even some toast.  Once he was done, Rex looked at all that he was loading onto his plate and groaned.  "I better be able to eat all this, and not be stress cooking..."  Rex sat down, grabbed a fork, and started scrolling through the alerts again.  He typed up responses he thought were reasonable enough to the questions in his notes, pausing only momentarily to note that he hadn't physically gotten up and grabbed a fork.  Once his first detailed and well thought out response was done, Rex was loading up seconds onto his plate.  By the next responses end, he was also getting thirds.  He groaned and looked at the pan and pot that he had cooked the food in and frowned.  “Yeah, I didn’t think I’d finish it all.”  After all was said and done, a third of the eggs and grits were scooped into tupperwares and the dishes were dropped into the sink.  

Once everything was put away, Rex sent his replies, went to his room, tossed the phone on the bed, and flopped down onto it.  “Ok, there’s one thing I need to be able to do before I try to learn anything else about this weird magick power.  I can summon lightning, I should be able to do this.”  Rex took up the lotus position, closed his eyes, and did his breathing exercises.  He reached inside for the tingling heat from before, the explosions in his veins and buzzing energy in his bones.  It rose from his stomach to his chest to his fingertips and the warmth built up there and light shone from his palms.

The energy flew from his fingers into the air and struck his ceiling as a bolt of plasma.  Rex yelped and covered his face to keep plaster out of his face.  When he peeked up, there was a sizable hole in his ceiling but the chunks were floating in the air just above and under it.  He could see that his hands were glowing magenta from inside and held them out to the hole.   "Ok… let's fix that.  Back to how it was…"  His brow furrowed and Rex curled his fingers together.  The chunks of plaster and roof tile that had been blasted off slowly fit themselves back into place, and sizzled white with heat.  Rex relaxed and it cooled into place.  "Ok.  Not what I meant."  Rex picked up his phone and tapped out replies, along with explanations of what has just happened, and grinned.  "Though this is definitely a development I can live with.  Ok, let's see…"  Rex held his hands out, palms facing each other, and let the energy spark up again.  He reached cautiously this time and less of the power rushed out, to his relief.  The magenta glow encompassed blinding white and Rex struggled to keep it between his hands.  "C'mon, c'mon, I can do this."  He pushed his hands together slowly and concentrated on a shape. "Ball, a ball will work splendidly, c'mon…"  It condensed into what he was thinking of for a moment, bringing a smile to his face.  Then it shot out through his closet, and Rex sighed.  "Fuckin hell…"

Over the next few hours, Rex shot holes in his room and home, repaired them, ate the leftovers of his breakfast, and put the dog outside.  Finally, Rex held his hands together and breathed, letting the power flow from his stomach up to his chest, and out to his fingertips and palms.  The energy rushed out to meet another strand and he focused solely on the shape of a ball.  “This is plasma, it should behave like it does on a larger scale right?”  He thought of the sun and how all of its plasma was pulled together into one big spinning ball.  The energy bent and swirled around in a vortex and Rex’s eyes widened.  When the plasma arched out he pulled it back in and focused on the stars, how they pushed and pulled themselves into shape.  The white pink light followed the example he was thinking of and a sphere of magenta plasma formed in his hand.  “Awesome!”  Rex cupped his hands and the sphere maintained its shape, light somehow not upsetting his horrendous sight.

“Ok, now for the fun part that I was actually trying to do…”  Rex pushed the sphere slowly  _ gently _ out in front of him and breathed more energy into it.  The orb expanded slowly and the various elements that made up a human being came to mind.  The energy shook and threatened to burst, but Rex refused to let that stop him.  He closed his hands back together slowly and huffed in frustration.  “Why can’t I do this?  No, no I’m not gonna let that happen.  I can do this.  I can fucking do this.”  He tapped his chin and took a deep breath.  Rex closed his eyes and thought of himself, molded the ball in front of him into a replica of the face he saw in the mirror he rarely used.  He spread out his legs and flexed his toes, his legs, his stomach, every inch of himself that he could.  The energy reached out and met his flexing, power sensing out what he wanted it to do.  His thoughts flicked to his writing and he hissed at himself.  “I need another me to even focus on this.”

He felt the energy shift and morph in on itself, a flash of light filling the room and spreading from the center of the orb outward.  When Rex opened his eyes, he was met with himself.  A mirror image of Rex’s body, though his eyes were circles of glowing magenta instead of brown.  The two high fived each other and let out whoops of excitement.  “SWICKED!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Any thoughts on this?


	4. Overtaxing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It takes a lot of energy to do certain things, and not all of that power comes from some unknown source.

Once that chunk of his consciousness was placed in the other body, Rex found himself more focused.  He took a video of both himself and the copy waving to his lovers and sent it before handing the phone to the copy.  “I have a feeling I put all of my socialization into you?”

“More like I’m the part of you that wants nothing more than to talk with my lovers all day,” the clone corrected.  He then sat down in their spinning desk chair and laughed.  “Of course we’re naked, replicating the organic material alone is hard enough…”  While Rex 2 rambled away as he texted Ronan and Sophie, Rex himself closed his eyes and smiled.  The energy was more responsive, calmer, easier to control now.  Rex’s thoughts on the various stories that he was writing filled the next sphere as it expanded and took on his shape, leaving the man’s mind clearer than before and quiet for the first time in his life.

“This is amazing, and I need the laptop, move out of the chair.”  The Rex absorbed in his texting shrugged and got up, rolling onto his back on the bed.  The Rex obsessed with his writing sat at the desk and turned on the laptop without another word to them.  “Must type up the next chapter of Phantom Age and actually get started on 4 Idiots and a Djinni.”

Rex shook his head and pointed at the one already typing furiously.  “Your name is David until further notice.”  He turned to the one on the bed and tilted his head.  “Your name shall be Leico.”  The two gave him a thumbs up and Rex pulled some clothes on.  “You two do your things and I’ll be outside, testing these cool ass powers out.”  A grunt of acknowledgment and Rex snorted.  He held out his hand and the older phone on his desk, the one whose screen had shattered, even though it was a replacement from the insurance, flew to his hand was dropped into his pocket.

Rex clipped the green cable his family had bought to keep Angel in the yard to her collar and looked around the backyard.  “Everything you fucked up is fixed… that hole under the shed is sealed up with the cement from the moved storm drain thing, the ground is leveled out and the grass seems to have grown everywhere.”  He grinned and leaned against the wooden railing of the deck stairs.  “This explains why I was so hungry, and why I slept through the night.”  He held out a hand to the woods and a stick flew to it.  “Well, this is probably gonna burn up all the energy left from breakfast… should I eat something more first?”  He looked between the stick - large enough that he couldn’t get his whole hand around it - and the tiny phone and shrugged.  “Nah, I got this.  Transmutation time!”

Rex closed his eyes and breathed, marveling at the experience of having a somewhat quiet mind.  It was… different, to say the least.  The power rose to meet his wishes and reached out to the stick in his left hand, burning like the sun and shining pure white just past his eyelids.  Rex focused on his phone next, the wood turned into energy waiting to be made use of.  He remembered the screen as it was, unbroken and smooth, imagined it durable and nigh unbreakable like the last, and responsive to his touch.  The phone hummed and heated up in his right hand and Rex felt the power surge from his core out into the world.  His eyes snapped open and both items were liquid starlight, flowing into each other and settling in his right hand.  The light died down and the phone solidified as he had imagined it, unbroken, smooth, and after a quick press of the buttons to check, responsive.  “Holy crap!  I.. I did… it…”  Rex stumbled backward, his legs like rubber, arms aching, stomach completely empty and all around cold.  Ice formed at his feet and spread outward, the rest of the world darkening while his perception brightened, all the light from the sun zooming in toward him.  He fell back onto the steps of the deck and sagged, boneless, as frost spread out and the cold sapped heat from everything it could reach.  His scars ached, as did every muscle in his body, and getting up to his feet left him dizzy and scrambling for the railing.  He trekked up the mountain that was the stairs, glad to see that his clones were setting down a plate for him and offering a fork.  The food vanished in what felt like an instant and both clones even shot a bolt of plasma at his stomach when he was done.

Warmth flooded back into his body and Rex felt his breathing even out over eternity, hands shaking from the strain of moving.  He didn’t say anything,  _ couldn’t _ say anything, and simply sat there while David and Leico moved around his limp body, cooking lunch for the three of them.  “You know,” David said once he had their sandwiches ready, “if common sense says that you should ingest more calories before doing something new, then fucking do it.  I don’t wanna find out if I can die just from overusing this weird power.”  He then grabbed Rex’s arm and shook it, humming.  “Overuse of powers leads to rapid burning of fat, which leads to sagging skin thanks to the loss of filling.”

“If you want muscles, which I know you do, then you’re gonna have to work for em big guy.”  Leico was working on… something.  Neither of the others knew what, and Rex wasn’t in the mood to try and access whatever mind link they had used to tell that he was in trouble.  “And I know you do, so you’re gonna have to be less hypocritical and move on past those stretches you love so much.  Gotta actually, ya know, do some exercise.  I don’t like the random pains that shoot through my chest or the ache in my legs man.”

“You’re  just thinking of doing these workouts with Sophie,” David scoffed playfully, rolling his eyes.  “Though, that would probably make it more fun.”

“It definitely would.”  Leico nodded while Rex scarfed down his sandwich.  “Make sure he drinks something too, can’t have him choking out.”  Rex was in good hands.  It was simply rather surprising that  _ his _ hands were good for him anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just to make it clear: yes, I am the guy in this story, it's based on my imaginings. So yeah, this is what I can imagine happening to me. I'm weird.

**Author's Note:**

> So this is a thing that happened in my head today at work, who wants to see more of it? Tell me and I'll give it a whirl.


End file.
